VIEWPOINT | Our community can achieve greatness through volunteering

Guest column by Andy Patterson

I ignored the request hundreds of times.

For years, I heard the call for more mentors in our community and nodded along in agreement. Mentoring mattered. Kids needed adults to show up. I believed all of that – but I still didn’t sign up. My calendar was full. My work was demanding. My family kept me busy.

Mentoring was good. “People should do that,” I thought.

Last fall, my mindset changed.

The Sioux Falls Area Community Foundation awarded a grant to support the recruitment of more school-based mentors. At the news conference announcing the program, as we spoke publicly about the need for more mentors, something finally clicked.

Why would I expect others to raise their hand if I kept offering my own excuses?

So, I did the simplest thing I could do: I signed up to mentor through Teammates. Every week now, I spend one of my lunch hours with a 3^rd grade student at Cleveland Elementary School.

Once I started, it was clear that time really wasn’t my problem. Intention was.

If we want an engaged, generous community, we must recognize it isn’t someone else’s job.

It’s ours. And, in that moment, I realized, it’s mine.

That realization didn’t just change how I approached mentoring, it changed how I thought about the role of the Sioux Falls Area Community Foundation.

We are already deeply involved in the nonprofit landscape through our grantmaking and the generosity of our donors. We know what our local nonprofits need, and we talk about it every day. Volunteering has always been part of my personal life – through my church and other organizations. It’s how I was raised, and it’s how my wife, Sara, and I are raising our family.

What I hadn’t fully connected was how that sense of service could, and should, show up from me as a leader and from the Community Foundation as an employer. We decided to make volunteering a priority.

We’re a small team, and like many teams, we’re busy. It’s never easy to find the time for one more thing – but we committed to it.

The rules were simple: Staff members can take a few hours a month to volunteer. Because we serve as a fiscal sponsor for the program, we suggested school-based mentoring as an option for those unsure where to begin.

More important than the logistics, though, was the understanding behind them.

If “volunteering” shows up on someone’s calendar, we honor it. Meetings might need to move. Someone might not always be available. And that’s OK. We had to have a cultural understanding, together, of what this would mean, and why we thought it was important.

We didn’t want to just give each other permission – we wanted to give one another grace.

As a Community Foundation, we’re well-versed in giving back financially. Not everyone can do that. And nonprofit organizations need support beyond dollars alone. If we believe that, the question becomes: How can we be part of the solution?

So far, it’s been working.

Four of us are mentoring at elementary schools.

Mary Kolsrud, our chief philanthropy officer, is new to mentoring, but having explicit permission was the encouragement she needed to try. So far, she loves it.

Michelle Erpenbach, our director of community initiatives, mentors. Patrick Gale, our vice president of community investment, has spent more than 20 years working with nonprofits. He regularly serves lunch at The Banquet or helps at Bishop Dudley House, and now he also mentors a student.

Not everyone chose mentoring, and that was intentional.

This wasn’t about pushing people toward a single program or initiative. It was about asking a different question: What do you care about – and would you be willing to give your time to it?

For Jacqueline Palfy, our vice president of communications, the answer was easy: Books. Once a month, you’ll find her stocking shelves at Reach Literacy, where the sale of used books supports literacy outreach.

Nate Dally, on our philanthropy team, has donned a Santa hat for years, wrapping and delivering gifts for Sioux Falls Cares.

Others are still figuring out what fits them best, and that’s OK, too. There’s no timeline, no pressure, just a shared understanding that if you want to volunteer, you can.

It’s brought our staff closer together – we talk about what we’re doing and the why behind it.

It’s also brought us closer to the work itself. Sending a check out to a nonprofit matters, but sitting across the table from someone and being present changes you.

For me, I feel more authentic, connected and, frankly, useful.

I know we’re privileged to be able to do this. We’re a small team with a flexible workload. Nobody’s leaving a store unsupervised, an assembly line position vacant or a patient open on the table.

Not every business or every team can give their time in the same way. That’s OK. My ask is to figure out what you can do. Last fall, we shared needs from local nonprofits through The Giving Depot. The community response was amazing. People held food drives at work. They volunteered. They gave money. When they knew how to help, they helped.

We pride ourselves on being a responsive, problem-solving community.

What kind of culture could we create if we valued compassion alongside productivity? What could we do, together, if we gave each other grace to step up in this way?

It can start with something as simple as a lunch break.

Andy Patterson is the CEO of the Sioux Falls Area Community Foundation.